Michael Cunningham, CEO of AHEC, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the organization.
AHEC has been in the community since 1990.
Cunningham said, “As of this month, I’ve actually been with the agency for 25 years myself, great work that we’ve been able to do. Some of our historic programs have been our big tobacco program with the state of Florida, and then we do a lot of work with our local health professionals helping them maintain their licensure. In fact, we’ll be doing a big course in February for our prescribers on opioids, which is a new requirement for them. We’re working with the University of Miami.
On January 24 the 54th annual UM Florida Keys health fair will be held from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Marathon Middle School, the Methodist Church in Big Pinen and at the Key West High School.
Cunningham said, “We’ll see about 700 people that day. What’s great about this health fair is you don’t walk out with a bag of information. They actually do real health services. So full women’s health, full men’s health, full venipuncture. It’s a really big deal. And then, of course, 12 years ago, we started our primary care program here in the county, focusing just on children. Then, of course, we added our dental program four years ago, and we just put out an announcement yesterday that Dr. Ziada Nieves Lopez, who is a board certified pediatric dentist who offers the highest level of children’s oral health care joined our team, and she’ll be at the helm, serving the kids moving forward.”
Dental health is important to AHEC.
Cunningham said, “We’ve been very lucky to be a partner with the school district for a really long time. So we’re in 10 public schools, but we serve children from every public school, private school, charter school or home schooled. So if you’re a student here in Monroe County, you can access any of our sites at any of the locations. Our mobile dental unit goes to those same 10 schools on a 10 week rotational basis. We have an office here in Marathon running one to two days a week and then we just opened up our first school based Dental Center at HOB school. We’re slowly getting that scheduled, and we’ll be running full speed just after the January break.”
AHEC also helps with medical care.
Cunningham said, “With with our medical side, we have 72% of our kids that are either uninsured or on Medicaid and being uninsured now, it doesn’t mean you’re from a poor family. A lot of our moderate income families, who just can’t afford that big insurance bill, and on the dental side, it’s over 99%. It’s huge. The more we do, the more we’re finding the need for and why we’re doing preventative care, treatment on the primary care level, now we’re starting to see those kids that are in need of specialty care and things a little bit beyond what our clinics can do. So we’re trying to establish those partnerships with not only our local providers, but then with Nicholas Children’s as well, and that’s specific to a cardiology program that they have up there, because we’re going to be needing to do EKGs for all of our incoming athletes by a law that was passed last year that will begin in July of this year.”
With health insurance costs increasing, AHEC is keeping an eye on everything.
Cunningham said, “We’ve been watching everything come down. We understand that families are likely to face higher premiums, which means they’re going to lose their health care coverage. Medicaid, every year is kind of on the chopping block, so folks lose coverage there. So programs like this, that can be there, for our families that are no cost and low cost, really, we’re trying to create access for these individuals. We can get them into us. We can take care of them, get the basics taken care of, and then work with them for some of the specialty care items that they need. But last year, we faced the whole DOGE thing in July. We’re all for eliminated inappropriate expenses, but we just never thought that health care as an essential service was something that would be on the cutting block. So we’re still working on filling holes for that. Then, of course, we were just told that last week, Tuesday, Representative Steele from Dade City, filed House Bill 605, which may cause further damage to the nonprofits statewide with its language.”
How did the budget cuts affect Keys AHEC?
Cunningham said, “Normally each year we have to raise about $3 million in contracts and grants. Our health care program last year was about 1.9 million of that. Beginning of the year we were in the House and Senate budget, everything was moving just the way it should have been. And then we got a call on Sunday at five that the governor did his veto list, and he didn’t veto us specifically, but he vetoed the entire section of the budget that we were in, and he did that across many agencies, so the question was, did he veto us or just the section? Did he know what he was vetoing? But regardless, that was a loss of about $975,000 and then DOGE came into the into play. Our county government, we knew what reduction was coming. We were hoping it was going to be 25%, that was proposed. It wasn’t supported. So we ended up getting a 50% reduction. But what happened with that, too, is as county government cut those funds, they also cut funds, say to our county health department, which then they eliminated contracts with community based organizations. So the ripple effect was huge, and we ended up facing a $1.2 million hole in our budget, which, when you only have 1.9 to start is it’s a pretty big gap to fill. So we did some restructuring internally. We eliminated a bunch of expenses. We had to shut down some clinical days. We had to eliminate some staffing, but we took and we utilized some internal funds to help fill that gap. So we had about an $850,000 gap coming into the year, and currently we’re about still about $320,000 short. So fundraising, new grants have been successful over the first six months of the year, but we still have this gap to fill, and hopefully, by doing that, we won’t need to cut back anything further as we get into the second half of the year.”
Could there be further challenges coming up?
Cunningham said, “What we saw was House Bill 605, was filed on the House side. The good thing is, it doesn’t have a companion bill on the Senate side, but we will need to watch it. One of the things in the bill is that there’s no exception language yet. So we’re going to be watching things. If it gets some traction, and we’re going to be looking to see if we can add some exception language. But what concerns us is House Bill 605, prohibits political subdivisions, which is local government, from using public funds to fund any not for profit entity or organization. So that takes away of local governments control to do what’s best for their communities. We’re hoping that that’s not something our local commissioners and councilmen accept.”
Is there a way to create carveouts for AHEC?
Cunningham said, “That’s what we’re looking at right now. So we’ll be focusing on that. These bills usually are reviewed multiple times as they go through, maybe it won’t have a companion bill, and kind of dies on the vine. But otherwise, we have to watch this, because it’s not just keys AHEC, it’s not just Monroe County. This is something that’s going to happen statewide. There’s just too many folks in our communities that are providing the backbone, the work that needs to be done that need access to this type of service and health care. It’s even beyond healthcare. I mean, you look at what we do here in Monroe County, with SOS and some of the other nonprofits and how they take care of our residents, and what would happen if all of a sudden none of them existed. The hospitals do a great job, but they’re revenue generating, same with our private practices, where there’s only a few entities within the county, we’re the ones that take care of these individuals, everything from children’s health care, oral health care, women’s health, prenatal care, and then primary care, and even specialty hospital care, through good health clinic for those who fall under their financial requirements. We still have a lot of really great things happening. We’re full speed ahead. The need is still there and we’re meeting it. So I want to leave on a positive note, that we’re there. We’re working every day, making huge strides. But we do have some things that we need to watch, and we’re hopeful to work themselves out as we get closer to the end of the legislative session.”
For more information, click here: https://keysahec.org